Search Engine Optimization

We integrate Search Engine Optimization into every website we create.
We provide monthly  Google Analytics reporting of website traffic.

What is Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's unpaid results-often referred to as "natural" & "organic" results.

• SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience.
• Optimizing a website requires editing its content, HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.
• Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic.
• In 2015, mobile search had surpassed desktop search. Google is developing and pushing mobile search as the future in all of its products and many brands are beginning to take a different approach to their internet strategies^[

Search engine optimization is an ongoing process that requires regular monitoring.

Getting indexed

The leading search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo!, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages that are linked from other search engine indexed pages do not need to be submitted because they are found automatically.

Two major directories, the Yahoo Directory and DMOZ, both require manual submission and human editorial review.

Google offers Google Search Console to accept XML Sitemap feeds that ensure all pages are found, especially pages that are not discoverable by automatically following links.

Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by the search engines. Distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled.

Increasing prominence

A variety of methods can increase the prominence of a webpage within the search results.

• Cross linking between pages of the same website to provide more links to important pages may improve its visibility. 
• Writing content that includes frequently searched keyword phrase, so as to be relevant to a wide variety of search queries will tend to increase traffic. 
• Updating content so as to keep search engines crawling back frequently can give additional weight to a site.
• Adding relevant keywords to a web page's meta data, including the title tag and meta description, will tend to improve the relevancy of a site's search listings, thus increasing traffic.

White hat versus black hat techniques

SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques of which search engines do not approve.

Industry commentators have classified these methods, and the practitioners who employ them, as either white hat SEO, or black hat SEO.

• White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing.
   
• An SEO technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note.

White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see. White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility, although the two are not identical.

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking.

Grey hat SEO. This is in between black hat and white hat approaches where the methods employed avoid the site being penalised however do not act in producing the best content for users, rather entirely focused on improving search engine rankings.

Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization